Special Issue of Feral Feminisms
Due Date: 03-15-2026
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is not neutral; neither is it generative, nor intelligent. It is a colonial technology of extraction and replication, built on stolen data, racialized labor, and computational enclosures of language and image. It materializes what Ruha Benjamin calls “the New Jim Code” and what Safiya Noble has shown as the algorithmic reproduction of white heteropatriarchal order. Queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous critiques of technology have named the body as a site of algorithmic violence and speculative reconstruction (i.e., Chen; Lewis et al.; McGlotten; TallBear). This issue therefore begins not from tacit consent qua fascination with GAI’s creative potential but from its feral undoing—its breakdowns, hallucinations, leaks, and refusals that reveal the violence of its making.
Rather than imagining how queer or feminist approaches might “humanize” AI, this issue recognizes the settler colonial violence intrinsic to techno-solutionism (Reyes-Cruz et al.; Schwartz et al.) and what Zhasmina Tacheva and Srividya Ramasubramanian name “AI Empire”—a global formation of hegemony, extractivism, surveillance, and subjugation that reproduces the logics of colonialism and racial capitalism through algorithmic and material infrastructures. The harms of AI, in other words, are structural necessities of empire in that they are violences that render certain lives exploitable, governable, and disposable. Yet communities long cast as vulnerable (Indigenous, Black, queer, trans, and disabled people) also demonstrate ingenuity, alterity, and sustained refusal. Their epistemologies of relationality, sovereignty, and liberatory praxis already articulate what justice in the wake of AI could be. Ferality thus becomes a critical posture of a “data resurgence” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian). This resistant epistemic stance tears at the ontological foundations of AI Empire.
We invite pieces for this issue that might ask:
— How do the analytics of queer, crip, and decolonial feminisms expose GAI’s ontological violence?
— What is the AI “black box” problem to QTBIPOC (Hassija et al.; Thalpage)?
— What would it mean to turn “feral theory” toward generative AI (Montford and Taylor)?
— How might we use ferality as a critical disposition to gnaw at, distort, and unmake the epistemic logics of the latest trillion-dollar infrastructure of annihilation?
— How might we ferals refuse GAI’s seductions of optimization and control and reimagine an insurgent “feral intelligence” (FI)?
— How can artists and dreamers remix, corrupt, and/or mourn the machinic?
Please visit our website to view the full CFP and list of submission guidelines and deadlines. Abstracts are due 15 March 2026.